“E ‘comprensibile se mi trovate interessante in questo momento, io sono alla guida di una Alfa Romeo, dopo tutto. Sentitevi liberi di toccare la mia zone sexy.” Is what you can say to people of the opposite gender once you’ve shelled out some cash and bought one of these beauties. Or something like that. Look, we don’t speak Italian we just used Google translate to try and impress you, okay? We won’t do it again.

Ooooh, just look at it! You have to hand it to the suave, well dressed swines at Alfa Romeo because they really do know how to design a good looking machine. The sweeping lines, the ingenious headlamp placement, the balance and poise, the bold ‘slash’ design feature down each flank and the perfect dimensions, oooh it’s just bloody gorgeous. Of course it wasn’t just Alfa who penned it; styling supremos Pininfarina had a lot to do with it too. They’re just as good with a pen and paper as Alfa, so a combined effort from the two was going to be nothing short of beautiful.

…in order to own one of these beauties but you don’t, you just need £2k. In fact you don’t even need that as our selected car demonstrates that you can buy one for much less than that, leaving you with £650 for espresso and jumpers.

£1350, that’s madness! It’s justified though, as the owner himself may have been driven to madness by this very car. You see under all that beauty and style lies a mechanical platform which boasts the same level of reliability as a Tag Heuer replica bought from a Turkish market stall. These things don’t break down, they implode. Cam-belts go without warning, gearboxes just stop and the electrics go on strike more frequently than a 1980’s coal miner, and each and every problem costs big money to fix.

To this day it’s unconfirmed, but most owners think their cars had an internal timer fitted which meant they started to break down roughly 18 seconds after the manufacturer’s warranty expired. Some just thought they’d bought a lemon. Some owners, however, were happy and found themselves owning one of the seemingly randomly assigned selection of Spiders which didn’t break down. Thankfully it’s those cars (for the best part) which are on the market today. The rest, well…

…thay’ve been, ahem, taken care of.

The chances are that if you buy one today it’ll have been fixed so many times in its life that there is nothing left to break. So in theory you should be fine. Even if it does break, it won’t matter as it didn’t even cost you £2000! At the end of the day you’ll have an Italian ‘sports’ car with a peel-off roof which will make pretty girls want to do this…

…because pretty girls like to sit on cars and paint their nails. Did you not know that? We’d put some T-cut on her feet and bottom though, you know, to kill two birds with one stone. If she’s going to sit on your Alfa it may as well be for a reason.

So, go out and buy one. You can drive it through the Brecon Beacons while pretending you’re actually driving along the Stelvio Pass while Matt Monroe sings ‘Days Like These’ (that’s the song from the opening scene of The Italian Job, in case you didn’t know) on the stereo. The other half will be shouting at you for driving too fast, the temperature gauge will be rising quickly, the warning lights will be flashing, the gearbox will be crunching and the cam-belt will fall off. But sod it, you’ll be in a Pininfarina-penned Alfa Romeo Spider, and that’s all that matters!